Winning on Walmart

Winning on Walmart

Over the past few years, we’ve been fortunate to work with a number of Walmart’s largest suppliers and grow their eCommerce businesses.

Our relationship with Walmart.com began in 2014, working with them to analyze product pages and provide suggestions as to how to improve online content. We soon added Content Service Provider (CSP) capabilities (prior to the existence of the official CSP program). Today, we’re one of only a very few premier CSPs that publish content directly to Walmart and Jet’s backend systems, both for core content (product descriptions and images), rich media and marketing content, and 360 degree product tours.

With our history of product page analysis for Walmart, our experience as a premier CSP, and with a number of Content Analytics team members who have worked for both Amazon.com and Walmart.com, we know what it takes to help you win on the largest eCommerce sites in the world.

Our team has set up thousands of new products for sale, helped organize and optimize content for large and small brands alike, and assisted our customers in improving online availability and buy box ownership for their products.

That expertise is crucial when considering the numbers. As of December 2017, Walmart.com had more than 500 million visits. Here are our key pointers on how to modify your content so that it stands out, helping you to differentiate your products and win:

Images that relate product size are equally important, especially for items where image scale isn’t obvious. For example, if you’re listing a small item: show a photo of the product to scale next to something recognizable, like a coin or another familiar object.

Publishing excellent product imagery requires an end to end workflow solution: uploading images to a single directory, pushing them to Walmart.com, and confirming those images went live and stay live. We’ve leveraged many resources over the years to ensure the Content Analytics platform automates the entire content management process.

Optimized Product Descriptions

Without complete product descriptions for each product online, you’ll never convert browsers to shoppers. You’d be surprised how many products only feature bland descriptions like “12-ounce package”, a list of ingredients, or just a phrase or sentence (e.g.“batteries not included”).

How do items end up with poor product descriptions?

Typically it’s because these are the descriptions that were included when the items were originally set up, especially if those items were intended for sale solely at Walmart brick and mortar stores. When you’re only selling in store, a 200 or 300-word long well-written description isn’t going to affect whether your item shows up on the store shelf or whether the shopper is clear what product they’re buying.

However, online, where the shopper can’t touch or feel the product, the product description has to replace in the in-store experience. Search engines also weigh language contained in product descriptions for search result rankings. If there aren’t enough relevant keywords and descriptions for search engines to spider your products accurately, your product pages don’t appear in the search results and remain virtually invisible on the digital shelf.

Until just recently, suppliers' choices were limited when it came to featuring rich media on Walmart.com. Many suppliers confided in us that the process of publishing rich media on the site was time-consuming and expensive.

With our integrated rich media support, the Content Analytics platform automatically publishes marketing content, videos and 360 views directly to your product pages on Walmart.com in a matter of minutes. (Although many brands have agencies or in-house staff that produce rich media, we have resources to facilitate production as needed.) We can also convert rich media you’ve published elsewhere and push it to your Walmart.com product pages, making it really easy to deliver a product page experience that will convert eager shoppers.

Product Availability

Brands invest an incredible amount of time, energy, and money in R&D, product delivery and marketing. But often they miss a key step in making sure that shoppers can buy their products—namely making sure that their products are in stock. Did your buyer place the order? Did the order go through? Did the product ship from the warehouse? Did your product get picked up by a blogger and sell out?

You could try to check every single one of your product pages all day long—or you could use our automated alerts to let you know if your product has gone out of stock or if quantities are running low. Hoping your supply chain system will let you know if a product is out of stock? Don’t hold your breath. By the time you get a weekly report, it’ll be too late to take any action.

Have more questions or need help increasing your sales on Amazon.com or Walmart.com? Let's get in touch.